The Suitor

Minnie's parents were not too happy when a German immigrant named William began to come around to court her. After all, he was fifteen years her senior. Will had arrived in the United States as a teenager during the last decade of the 19th century. He and his elder sister Louisa had left their native village of Denz after an influenza epidemic that had left them orphans. The teenagers had other relatives who had already emigrated to the Mohawk Valley and hoped to meet up with them.

The story goes that Louisa's only pair of shoes was stolen on the trip across the Atlantic Ocean, and so she first set foot on American soil in her bedroom slippers. Knowing only a few words of English  --  "apple pie" was one phrase that enabled them to enjoy this treat on their trip upstate  --  the pair somehow found their siblings near Fort Plain and settled into their new lives.

William learned a skilled trade; carving wooden furniture for a local company, he soon became a gifted cabinetmaker.

Despite the initial reticence of Minnie's parents, the courtship progressed to its natural conclusion: The couple were married in a simple ceremony in Minnie's parents' home on February 28, 1912  --  100 years ago this week. Evidence of Will's artistry soon began to fill the family home: carved chair-, lamp-, and table legs, bookends, intricately inlaid checkerboards and trays with Masonic emblems.

Photo of Grandpa Will with carved vase

Later, when Will had to seek employment farther afield (at General Electric in Schenectady, 50 miles from home), he would send weekly postcards home to his loving wife and lively children. Minnie sometimes complained that every week she would set strict behavioral expectations for the children, but that Dad would spoil them when he came home on the weekend.

Minnie and Will were married for 37 years, until Will's death in the fall of 1949.

Will with carving tools and carved bookends

Presidents' Day

Today is Presidents' Day, which commemorates the birthdays of two of the most famous and beloved American Presidents: George Washington, born February 22, 1732, and Abraham Lincoln, born February 12, 1809.

Last week's post told a bit about one of Minnie's forebears who was a contemporary of Abraham Lincoln. Reaching back another century (and five generations) into the family archives, we come across a father and son who were contemporaries of our first President, George Washington.

Gerrit Van Slyke, born in 1729, and his son Nicholas, born in 1764, both fought in the Battle of Oriskany, one of the decisive battles of the American revolution. Nicholas, a young teenager at the time, is listed as a fifer (i.e., he played a high-pitched flute which was used to signal changes in formation during battles) in the Tryon County militia.

The regiment was to head west through the Mohawk Valley to Fort Stanwix, at what is now Rome, New York, which was under siege by the British. But the militia, composed mostly of farmers turned soldier, was ambushed by a force of British soldiers and their Mohawk and Seneca allies in a deep ravine about six miles from the fort. The militia was assisted by a group of Oneida warriors from the nearby village of Oriska.

In the fierce fighting that followed, there were great casualties on the American side. But the British and their Mohawk and Seneca allies eventually retreated, leaving the American survivors to gather up their dead and wounded.

A listing of the roster of militiamen present at the battle incorrectly lists Nicholas as killed during the battle. Although casualties were indeed heavy on the American side, Nicholas and his father both survived the battle. Nicholas lived to see the United States established as an independent country; he went on to marry at the young age of 19, but died before the age of 30 in 1792, the year that George Washington was elected to his second term as President.

We don't have any photographs of Nicholas and Gerrit of course, but in the family archives is a daguerreotype of Nicholas's son David and his wife Elizabeth.

David Van Slyke (1787-1868) and Elizabeth Hellegas (1790-1872)

                                                                        
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American schoolchildren may know of the legend about George Washington and the cherry tree: According to this anecdote, as a young child, George was given a hatchet, and proceeded to try it out in the garden. He chopped down a small cherry tree that was a favorite of his mother's, and when questioned about what happened to the tree, he confessed that he was indeed the culprit. Because of this legend, we often associate cherries and cherry trees with our first President.

Here then, is a recipe for cherry cake from Minnie's cookbook, in honor of Washington's birthday:

Minnie's Cherry Cake Recipe

In trying this one out, I didn't have to do much adapting, other than figuring out the steps in preparing the cake:

- 2 cups flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
- 1/2 cup butter or margarine
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1/2 cup cold water
- 1 cup cherries (I used frozen pitted cherries, thawed)

Pitted cherries

Pre-heat oven to 350 Fahrenheit.
Grease and flour cake pan; pre-sift flour.
Sift together dry ingredients, except sugar.
Cream together butter and sugar; beat in eggs.
Add flour mixture and water alternately; beat until smooth.
Fold in cherries.
Bake for 20 -25 minutes, until toothpick comes out clean.

Grandma's Cherry Cake

With all the natural ingredients, it's a tasty snack for Presidents' Day, or any day for that matter!

A Civil Wartime Bride

Imagine a lifetime spanning four wars. This was the case of Minnie's maternal grandmother, Margaret Colson Van Slyke. Margaret was born in December 1840, during the Presidency of Martin Van Buren, who began life as the son of a tavernkeeper and farmer in Kinderhook, New York. During Margaret's childhood, the United States went to war with its southern neighbor (Mexican-American War 1846 - 1848), during the Presidency of James K. Polk. She was a young adult during the American Civil War (1861 - 1865); a grandmother during the Spanish-American War (1898); and a great-grandmother during World War I (1914 - 1918).

The photo below was probably taken around 1915, when Margaret was 75 years old. As you can see, her first great-grandchild was named after her:

Four generations in 1915

I don't know how greatly the foreign wars affected life in the small towns of the Mohawk Valley, but I can't help but think that life there was deeply impacted by the omnipresence of the Civil War. The New York State Archives contains a database of more than 360,000 soldiers from New York State who served in the Civil War, including contemporaries of Margaret who served in the Fort Plain Battery, a regiment of light artillery.

Margaret took her marriage vows at the height of the Civil War; she and Jonas Van Slyke were married on June 26, 1864. I doubt that Margaret wore any of the finery and frippery sketched out in the May issue of Godey's Lady's Book, such as the "pompadour porte-jupe," but we do know that she had a fine silk shawl that I picture her wearing on her wedding day.

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One of the recipes in Minnie's handwritten cookbook is called "Johnny Cake." It's an old-fashioned recipe for cornbread. For some reason, I tend to associate this recipe with the Civil War, perhaps because it makes me think of the old song from that era, "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." But this may be a false connection, as this type of pancake or flat cornbread is also variously known as "journey cake" or "hoe cake" in other parts of the country. It may originate from Native American methods of preparing corn meal, either baked in the ashes of a cooking fire, or steamed. Here is Minnie's original recipe:

Johnny Cake Recipe

I didn't have to do much modernizing here  --  only substitute 1/3 cup cooking oil for the notation "Butter size of egg." I followed these steps:

- Pre-heat oven to 375 F.
- Grease and flour cake pan. (I used a 10 inch spring-form cake pan.)
- Sift together corn meal, flour, salt, baking powder, and sugar:

- Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients.
- Pour in milk, egg, and oil; beat until well mixed.
- Pour in cake pan and bake for about 20 minutes.

This made a rather flat cornbread, that I can imagine travelers could easily wrap in a paper or cloth, and carry off in their saddlebags on a trip  --  hence the possible name "journey cake."

Johnny Cake - fresh out of the oven

I enjoyed a piece while it was still hot, smeared with a dab of butter and drizzled with honey:

It made a good breakfast or snack on a chilly morning.

Kippensoep -- wat gezellig!

You are chilly and your nose is running. Or you have a fever, aches, and a stuffy nose. How about some nice chicken soup? It seems to be a universal remedy for the mid-winter blues  --  or for whatever else ails you.

Last week I had a sinus infection, and besides prescribing a round of antibiotics, my doctor (who is from East Asia) actually told me to go home and make some chicken soup. Her recipe was not all that different from the one in Grandma Vandenbergh's old Dutch cookbook, thus proving to my aching head that chicken soup indeed has a universal appeal.

Chicken soup ingredients

Chicken Soup:

- 1 soup chicken
- 8 cups (2 liters) cold water
- 2 teaspoons (10 grams) each salt, mace, parsley
- 1/4 cup (50 grams) butter or margarine
- 1/4 cup (50 grams) flour
- 1/3 cup (60 grams) rice
- 1 egg

The list above is from Grandma's cookbook. As you can see in the picture, I did not have a whole chicken, so I reduced the amount of water to 6 cups, and added onion, garlic, a couple of bay leaves, a bouillon cube, and some sliced carrots to give the soup a little more "oomph." I also omitted the egg.

Grandma's recipe tells you to simmer the chicken in the water, along with the salt, mace, parsley, and rice until the rice is cooked. Stir the flour into the melted butter, and add it slowly to the soup to thicken it. Remove the chicken from the pot, cut the meat into small pieces and add them back into the soup. I also added a few croutons for crunch (until they got a bit soggy).

Kippensoep

The steam from the simmering pot of soup was also therapeutic for my clogged sinuses. So if you're feeling stuffy or have a cold, have some chicken soup, and get plenty of rest.

Or as my Mom used to say, "Vroeg naar bed, kind!"  Get to bed early, kid!

The Cheese Stands Alone

Grandpa VandenBergh loved Limburger cheese. But the story goes that when he was enjoying this treat, no one else in the family wanted to come too close, as this variety of cheese is quite odoriferous. There are many other varieties of Dutch cheese, perhaps the most well-known being Gouda and Edam.

Smoked Gouda, Gouda, and Limberger cheeses

A little over half of the milk produced in the Netherlands is processed into cheese, about half of which consists of various varieties of Gouda. Dutch cheeses are exported to 130 countries, with Germany, Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom importing the largest quantities.

I recall visiting a cheese store in Zaanse Schans when I was in the Netherlands last summer, where you could sample a great variety of different kinds and flavors of cheese. It was almost as good as visiting a chocolate factory.

My favorite kind is indeed Gouda, which is mild, smooth, and creamy. I used it to make a comfort food for a damp and dreary day: good old macaroni and cheese. The recipe in Grandma VandenBergh's old cookbook was a little different from the way I usually make it, as it did not include added milk. But whether you make macaroni and cheese from a box (which I don't recommend), or from your favorite recipe, it can cheer you up on a gray winter day. In true frugal Dutch fashion, the recipe also suggests a way to use up some leftover ham, and suggests using "old, dried chunks" of cheese.

Macaroni with Ham and Cheese

- 100 grams (1/2 to 1 cup) ham
- 200 grams (2 cups) macaroni
- 1/2 liter (2 cups) water
- 1/2 teaspoon salt ("wat zout")
- 100 grams cheese (4 oz.; about 1 cup grated)
- 30 grams (2 tablespoons) butter
- breadcrumbs for sprinkling on top

-Cook the macaroni according to the directions on the package. While it is cooking, chop or cube the ham, and finely grate the cheese.
- When the macaroni is almost cooked and most of the water has evaporated, add the ham and cheese and toss.
- Add half of the butter, pour the mixture into an ovenproof baking dish, sprinkle with breadcrumbs, dot with the remaining butter and set in a medium oven until crusty.

The recipe is the simplest I've ever seen for made-from-scratch macaroni and cheese. It is a bit drier than I am accustomed to, so I did add about 1/3 cup milk while mixing it up, to make it a bit creamier.

Mac and cheese with ham

A Dutch cow produces about twenty liters of milk per day; it takes ten of those liters to produce one kilo of Gouda cheese. So the next time you enjoy a slice of Gouda, think of the cow that produced enough milk to make two kilos of your favorite cheese, a cheese which has been sold on the Gouda cheese market for over three hundred years.

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Sources:

Dutch Dairy Industry. Nederlandse Zuivel Organisatie (Dutch Dairy Board) http://www.nzo.nl/images/html/DutchDairyIndustryAV100924.pdf  Accessed 1/28/2012.

Engelbrecht, Karin. "Say Cheese! Dutch Cheese - Dutch Cheese Varieties"  http://dutchfood.about.com/od/aboutdutchcooking/a/SayCheese.htm Accessed 1/28/2012.

"From Cow to Cheese - Cheese in the Netherlands" http://www.kaasmarkt.nl  Accessed 1/28/2012.

Warm Milk

As mentioned in an earlier post, both of my grandmothers grew up in areas where dairy farms formed a large part of the economy as well as the landscape. In Grandma VandenBergh’s native country, if you imagine a million and a half cows grazing in grassy fields, you will have a mental picture of the Dutch countryside today. 

Dutch Dairy Farm

And if you imagine that each cow produces an average of 8,000 kilograms of milk each year, that’s a lot of milkshakes, yogurt, butter, powdered milk, and cheese, as well as plain liquid milk. In all, the Dutch dairy sector provides about 57,000 jobs, caring for the cows and processing the milk produced by these placid bovines.

The cows pictured above graze tranquilly on one of the Netherlands’ 20,000 dairy farms. The dominant breed of dairy cow in the Holstein Friesian, a descendant of the Friesland Holland cows and bulls that have been exported to North America since the mid-19^th century. In fact, it was almost certainly a Friesian Holstein that Grandpa VandenBergh walked home from Castleton to Albany in the family’s early years in America. 

Barn in Dutch Countryside

I found a recipe in Grandma VandenBergh’s cookbook that calls for warm milk. I can picture her using milk produced by “Baasje” to prepare this typical Dutch recipe for pancakes for her family of growing children:

Drie in de pan  (“Three in the Pan”: so called because you make the pancakes just the right size to fit three in your frying pan at once)

-        2 cups (250 grams) whole wheat flour

-        2 ½ tablespoons (15 grams) powdered yeast

-        3 ½ tablespoons ( 50 grams) vegetable oil or butter

-        1 ¼ cups (about 3 dL.) warm milk

-        ½ teaspoon ( 3 grams) salt

-        1/3 cup (50 grams) currants

-        1/3 cup (50 grams) raisins

-        ¼ cup (25 grams) candied fruit peel

(I was unable to find candied fruit peel in my local grocery store, so I added a half teaspoon of cinnamon to make up for that omission.)

Ingredients for "Drie in de Pan"

 

- Dissolve the yeast in 2 tablespoons of warm milk.

- Make a fairly stiff batter with the flour, salt, and the rest of the milk.

- Rinse the raisins and currants in warm water; add them to the batter along with the yeast mixture.

- Cover the bowl with a towel and let it rise for an hour in a warm place. 

The batter after rising for one hour

- Heat oil or butter in a frying pan or skillet. (I used cooking spray; you may need to spray the pan each time you add more batter.)

- Using a soup ladle, pour the batter into the pan so as to make three round or oval pancakes, and cook until golden brown, turning over once. (Turn over when edges become browned and bubbles form on top.) 

"Drie in de Pan" in the pan

- Serve with syrup or brown sugar.

"Drie in de Pan" on the platter

 

That is the basic recipe from Grandma VandenBergh’s 1922 cookbook. It makes a pleasant “comfort food” for brunch on a chilly January day. I found a very similar recipe in a modern Dutch cookbook that I purchased in the gift shop at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam last summer. This updated version calls for self-rising flour, which was probably not invented yet in Grandma’s time, as well as for an egg, which may make for a richer batter. But the basic recipe is the same, right down to the currants and raisins.

Eet smakelijk!

Sources:

Dutch Dairy Board – Dutch Dairy Sector – July 2011: http://www.prodzuivel.nl/Engels/DutchDairysector.pdf Accessed 1/22/2012.

Sterke, Marike. Deliciously Dutch: Text and Recipes. Arnhem, Netherlands: Terra, 2008.

Wittop Koning, Martine. Eenvoudige Berekende Recepten. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Boekdrukkerij N.V. W. Hilarius Wzn. 1922.

Sour Milk

Not far from my hometown is a small stream called the Sweet Milk Creek. I suspect that it was named such  --  or more likely the Zoete Melk Kill *  --  by early Dutch settlers in what is now Rensselaer County. The creek was perhaps so named because of the foam created when the water ran rapidly over the rocky creek bed. It is a popular trout stream, and a tributary of the Poestenkill, which empties into the Hudson River near Troy, New York.

The name of this creek conjures up bucolic scenes of cows grazing peacefully in grassy pastures. At the end of the day, they trudge slowly into the barn to be milked. But what happens if their sweet milk is left too long without refrigeration? If you have ever poured such milk into your morning coffee, you know exactly what has happened the moment your lips (or nose) get a sip or a whiff: it has turned sour.

What causes this "turning" of milk? It is a chemical reaction that occurs when the bacteria in milk consume the milk sugar (or lactose) and produce more bacteria. Over time, the resulting by-product is lactic acid, which gives the milk its sour taste. Pasteurization kills much, but not all of the bacteria. So if you keep your milk too long, even in the refrigerator, it will eventually turn sour.

Of course, in the early days before artificial refrigeration, milk had to be consumed promptly, otherwise it would turn sour more quickly than it does today in our fridges. What was one to do then, if it did go sour? Not to be wasteful, housewives developed recipes to use it up somehow, as in Minnie's recipe for Sour Milk Cake:

Minnie's Sour Milk Cake Recipe

Minnie got the recipe from her mother, Kittie Van Slyke ("Grandma Nan"), who also passed it along to my mother. As you can see from Mom's handwritten notes, she tried it out and adapted it as she saw fit:

Mom's recipe  -- from Grandma Nan

The ingredients are basically the same; since they do not include instructions, Mom figured out her own steps. Note how, similar to last week's Nut Cake recipe, the baking soda is dissolved in the milk, rather than being sifted into the flour. I don't know the rationale behind that technique, but it seems to work out.

If you need more detailed instructions, here is how I did it. I usually reduce the amount of sugar in a made-from-scratch cake recipe, and that turned out fine as well:

Sour Milk Cake

- 2 cups flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
- 1/4 cup butter, margarine, or baking sticks
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1 egg
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla (optional)
- 1 cup sour milk

Pre-heat oven to  350 degrees Fahrenheit; pre-sift flour.
Grease and flour an 8 inch cake pan.
Sift together flour and nutmeg; dissolve baking powder in milk.
Cream butter and sugar; beat in egg.
Add milk and flour mixtures alternately, beat just until mixed.
Pour batter into cake pan and bake until toothpick comes out clean, approximately 20 minutes.

Although the cake's consistency is a bit denser than that of a cake from a mix, your guests will never guess that its ingredients include sour milk. The sourness is not evident, and the oven's heat kills the bacteria that soured the milk.

Sour Milk Cake - fresh out of the oven

And in case you're wondering: If you don't have any sour milk, what to do? You can turn sweet into sour by pouring a tablespoonful of vinegar or lemon juice into your measuring cup, adding enough milk to make one cup, and leaving the concoction at room temperature for about 15 minutes. This technique will produce the same chemical change as Mother Nature. 

* Note: "kill" is an archaic Dutch word for "creek"; there are many such named streams in the area of Upstate New York settled by the Dutch in the 17th century: Normanskill, Wynantskill, Poestenkill, Lisha Kill, Fishkill, Wallkill, Stony Kill, Sanders Kill, Peters Kill, Swarte Kill, Kleine Kill, Platte Kill, and believe it or not, Beer Kill. ( I suspect that this last one really means "Bear Creek," as the Dutch word for "bear" is spelled "beer.")